Pittsburgh Steelers CB Beanie Bishop Jr. could hardly have had a worse finish to his rookie season. Not only did he lose his starting job, through no major fault of his own, the team tanked. On the cusp of locking up a division title, they ended the regular season on a four-game losing streak. They made the playoffs, but lost the AFC North, and were soon watching from home.
Afterward, ESPN reporter Brooke Pryor said that she sensed something like a sense of relief from the locker room. While they didn’t want to lose, she suggested that players felt glad to be out of the losing streak. Not surprisingly, Bishop told a different story of the Steelers’ locker room.
“Everybody was pissed”, Bishop said of the Steelers’ reaction to the end of the season on Big C’s NFL Preview podcast. “Obviously, knowing that we were 10-3 and then we went on a losing streak like that, that’s not what anybody expected”.
Indeed, the Steelers were just the third team in playoff history to end the regular season on a four-game losing streak. Only one of the three teams actually won a playoff game. The Steelers didn’t even come particularly close, no fault of Beanie Bishop, who hardly played.
By then, the Steelers were playing Cameron Sutton over Bishop, the former after returning from suspension. Perhaps by coincidence, a flurry of communication issues crept into the defense as Sutton’s snap count rose. Bishop hardly had a perfect rookie year, but he was on an upward trajectory. And as you might expect, he had certain feelings about his benching.
But the Steelers had bigger things to worry about than Beanie Bishop and his feelings. They were reeling by the end of the year, and it felt like there was no way to stop it. Granted, they had a rough go of it, playing some of the best teams in the league. They had some injuries to deal with, playing largely on the road, and on short weeks at odd times. None of those things excuse what happened, though.
“I just feel that guys tried to do what they could”, Bishop said of the Steelers’ collapse. “Obviously, there’s gonna be changes made over the offseason and things like that to see what the problems were. I feel like next year, it’s gonna be a lot better. With those problems that we had, we had a chance to see what those things were over the offseason. And see about how to fix those things”.
As an undrafted rookie, Beanie Bishop collected four interceptions. But he only played more than 52 percent of the snaps in one game after the bye week, and that was due to injuries. Including the playoffs, he logged just seven defensive snaps in their final three games. Would the Steelers have fared much better had he played a larger role? Most likely not—but he would have liked a chance to prove it.
